SAP has just released version 16 of what used to be Sybase ASE and is now SAP ASE. There are couple of interesting things about SAP ASE, one of which is related to this release and one of which isn’t. I’ll deal with the latter first.

The acquisition of Sybase by SAP has seen a renaissance for ASE. I’ve mentioned it before but it is worth repeating: Sybase ASE was trailing in market presence behind the 'Big 3' before the company was acquired by SAP and its number of users was more or less static. Since the acquisition, there has been a resurgence of new implementations: I reported last year that these had topped a thousand, and SAP personnel have informed me that there are now over 3,000 SAP Business Suite implementations running on ASE.

SAP ASE is broad and expansive in the real world

What has happened?

Is SAP ASE suddenly a much better database?

No. Actually, it was a pretty good database in the first place.

Of course, it supports SAP application environments, which it didn’t before, and that is the main driver for its resurgence.

But you can still implement SAP on Oracle or SQL Server or DB2 and if these are so much better than ASE how come ASE is gaining market share? Of course, dollars may be an issue but isn’t it also market presence? SAP has market presence, Sybase did not—so companies didn’t license ASE before but they do now. Which begs the question: is the IT industry a bunch of lemmings or are IT leaders really looking for best of breed solutions.

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